Linuxwatch: As Tools Come on the Scene, Developers Get Interested
As surveys show increasing interest in Linux by corporate developers, Inprise Corp. (
www.borland.com) is taking the wraps off its Kylix initiative. The high-performance Linux rapid application development environment will support Delphi, C, and C++.
Evans Marketing Services (www.evansmarketing.com) announced that the expectation of deploying Linux applications by development and IT managers in large corporations increased 75 percent during the last six months of 1999, and the percent of companies running Linux increased by 95 percent.
The findings are from a comparison of results for surveys of 400 IT and development managers conducted in May and December 1999. When asked in May 1999 if they expected to deploy any Linux applications in the next year, 16 percent of corporate IT managers said they did. Six months later, 29 percent held that expectation.
The number of companies running Linux on any of their servers doubled, increasing from 17 percent in May 1999 to 34 percent in December 1999. While this number includes all companies with any servers running Linux, the number of companies running Linux on more than 25 percent of servers increased from less than 2 percent in May 1999 to almost 13 percent the following December.
Inprise is staging a series of events to draw attention to its family of Linux development tools. "The same way that RAD tools -- like Delphi and Visual Basic -- set off an explosion of applications for Windows in the mid-90s, Kylix is planned to set off the next wave of mass Linux adoption," says Dale Fuller, interim president and CEO at Inprise. "There are millions of developers worldwide that are waiting for Kylix. This week's successful event is the beginning of our campaign to build the corporate infrastructure and a mass-market product and support network for Linux application development."
Kylix is a component-based development environment for two-way visual development of GUI, Internet, database, and server applications. Kylix will be powered by a new native Delphi/C/C++ compiler for Linux and will implement a native Linux version of the Borland VCL (Visual Component Library) architecture. Borland VCL for Linux is designed to speed native Linux application development and simplify the porting of Delphi and C++Builder applications between Windows and Linux.